American student Otto Warmbier arrives at the People’s Cultural House for a press conference on Monday in Pyongyang, North Korea. The parents of the student said Monday they had been unable to speak with their son since the North Korean police seized him two months ago.

SEOUL, South Korea – The parents of an American college student who tearfully apologized on North Korean state television on Monday for having plotted to steal a political banner said they had been unable to speak with their son since the North Korean police seized him two months ago.

In a statement about the arrest of the student, Otto F. Warmbier, an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, the parents, Fred and Cindy Warmbier, also said they hoped the televised apology would lead to his release. It was the first time they had said anything publicly about their son’s ordeal.

“Our top priority is to get him back home with us as quickly as possible,” read a copy of the statement released to the University of Virginia’s communications office after Otto Warmbier’s appearance on a North Korean news broadcast.

The statement urged the North Korean government to “consider his youth and make an important humanitarian gesture by allowing him to return to his loved ones.”

The statement said, “We had not heard from him during these many weeks, so you can imagine how deeply worried we were and what a traumatic experience this has been for us.” The careful wording suggested that all diplomatic efforts undertaken so far to establish contact between Warmbier and his parents had failed.

Warmbier, 21, from Cincinnati, had been completing an organized tour of North Korea when he was prevented from boarding a departing flight from Pyongyang, the capital, on Jan. 2. News of his arrest was not reported by North Korea’s state media for three weeks.

The televised apology showed Warmbier, dressed in a tie and jacket, sobbing as he beseeched the North Korean authorities to free him. It offered the first publicly disclosed indications of why he had been arrested by North Korea’s virulently anti-American government.

Saying he had made “the worst mistake of my life,” Warmbier admitted having stolen a political banner from the staff-only area of Pyongyang’s Yanggakdo International Hotel, partly at the urging of an Ohio church, a secret society at the University of Virginia that he aspired to join, and the CIA. North Korea’s state media called his action an anti-state crime.

It was impossible to ascertain whether the apology had been coerced. But the unlikely nature of the details suggested the script had been written by Warmbier’s North Korean interrogators.

The apology asserted, for example, that Warmbier had a profit motive in the theft because his family was suffering acute financial difficulties. It also asserted that he had concocted the plot months earlier while dining at the home of a friend whose mother was identified as a deaconess at the Friendship United Methodist Church of Wyoming, Ohio, a Cincinnati suburb.

Warmbier said the mother, whom he quoted as saying communism should be ended in North Korea, had offered him a $10,000 car if he succeeded and would pay his family $200,000 if he were caught and arrested.

Warmbier also said the Z Society, one of the University of Virginia’s oldest and most clandestine clubs, had encouraged him to steal the banner, promising him membership if he was successful.

Calls to the Friendship United Methodist Church for comment were not returned, and it was not immediately possible to reach any Z Society members. But students at the university, speaking privately, said it was absurd to suggest such a plot, particularly involving the Z Society, which is known for local charitable undertakings.

A number of Americans have been arrested and released over the years in North Korea, which has remained in a technical state of war with the United States since the armistice that halted the 1950-53 Korean War. But Warmbier was the first to be seized in the latest cycle of rising tensions over the North’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile activities, which is likely to lead to tightened United Nations sanctions.

Although American travel to North Korea is legal — and encouraged by the North Korean authorities to attract tourist revenue — the State Department strongly discourages U.S. citizens from visiting. All U.S. consular activities there are handled by the Swedish Embassy.

Asked about Warmbier’s televised apology, Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, told reporters Monday that the Obama administration was “aware of the situation involving Mr. Warmbier” and working through the Swedish Embassy to “learn about the circumstances of Mr. Warmbier’s detention.”

Swedish officials have repeatedly declined to comment on whether any efforts to conduct a consular visit with Warmbier have succeeded.

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